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Comment by johnnyApplePRNG | Hacker News Reader

>It does not tell you if the artist has sold the piece multiple times.

If you purchased a NON-FUNGIBLE-token, you can be sure that nobody else owns the same array of bytes which may or may not prove that you own a piece of art.

There may be many prints of the same original work created in multiple NFTs as there are in the art world... but it's not possible to sell the same NFT twice... on the blockchain at least... without re-acquiring it first.

Plenty of NFT sellers sell multiple issues/prints/copies of the same original artwork.

I think digital prints in NFT format are ridiculous but I digress.

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If you have the NFT signed by the artist's PGP key is the same thing though, no? You're the owner. Or the person you sign it to afterwards. What does the public blockchain offer in this case, except for fees?

It prevents the artist from signing the same thing twice. So with PGP you might be the owner of a thing, but you might not be the only owner of a thing.

A signature is simply that, a signature. It doesn't guarantee uniqueness and doesn't prevent you copying it any number of times.

An identity + timestamping mechanism would guarantee uniqueness of ownership, and a blockchain performs this in a relatively decentralised and trustless manner.

The blockchain sounds very centralised if it's the only place I can participate to verify my ownership. Decentralised would be if there was no third party(in this case the blockchain) necessary for verifying ownership. Which it actually isn't, because all that is needed is the signature of the author and maybe a timestamp or some other metadata signed along.

Of course! The blockchain is only decentralised compared to a centralised service such as Sotheby's and doesn't remove the third party entirely. The thing is unless you restrict the requirements of the artwork and the transaction not involving a third party actually restricts future guarentees that can be made to third parties.

If the restrictions of never involving third parties (in proofs of ownership or otherwise) is acceptable, then there's no need for any schema bar making the transaction itself.

The issue with removing the third party entirely (as the auther suggests) is the verifiability of the timestamp to any interested third parties. The simplest scenario is proof of existence of the artwork at time T. Without a timestamping mechanism there's nothing stopping the creator lying about when it was created, or when this transaction took place.

I wondered about that, too, and thought of a difference: if you sign it over to someone else with PGP, the first owner still has a file that was provably sold to them. They could fraudulently sell it again. A public blockchain would contain the whole chain of ownership, so you could tell who the current owner is.

Can't they have a public personal ledger somewhere for people to audit? Saying I sold X to Y. Like a tweet in a personal account. Why is the common blockchain necessary? Seems like centralization of information, is this what Web3 is about? Power to the gatekeepers?

As long as twitter can act as a trusted third party, tweets are a completely valid ledger as shown by Keybase.

Blockchains simply reduce the power and trust required in the third party by offering a different set of tradeoffs.

You don't really need Twitter, you need a platform and require the people that use the platform to bring in their ledgers so they are auditable by the public. I can view someone's work and examine if they're trustworthy or not. Similar to how people are signing their signatures, they could be just bringing together their ledger, which could be a bloom filter so it's just a single line of hash that I can verify I still own the thing they selled, you only need a system that can compare these and see if anything has been double spent. The point is, you don't need a running bitcoin-style blockchain for this. You can achieve the same validity with different means.

Using a bloom filter as a distributed hash means you're edging quite close to a blockchain, the only question your schema now has is consensus - how is work examined for trustworthiness? What prevents network spam?

I haven't puzzled it though but intuitively it feels like you wouldn't be able to achieve the "same validity" (aka you'd have a weaker set of guarentees) without the liveness of a blockchain like system. Whether you agree with what threshold of validity is acceptable is a different matter.

Yeah except you could sell the NFT on a different blockchain.

As far as NFTs are concerned, the existence of multiple incompatible blockchains is indistinguishable from what would be considered a network partition within a single blockchain for cryptocurrency.

@stagas:

> Can't they have a public personal ledger somewhere for people to audit?

Then you need to coordinate on a common authority to rely upon for the timestamping. Blockchain's whole purpose is to eliminate this dependency.

The signed message can have a timestamp on it. The only authority necessary is the signature of the author or the previous owner.

You need an authority to enforce that the author isn't signing a timestamp that does not match the actual clock time.

Still not convinced. I can audit the message so the only way to game this is we both have to be playing a game. Against who? A third person who we will try to sell afterwards? Same thing can happen in the blockchain as well, no-one can audit what happens off the chain which could be people coordinating.

I don't know what you mean by "audit the message."

Without third-party timestamping or blockchain, the same token can be sold to multiple buyers, and nothing can be used to determine which buyer is the first ("real") buyer.

This is the whole reason blockchain was invented. It wasn't possible to do it at all before that.

This is true, except there would at least be a record on some blockchain where the artwork was first proven to exist via a hash. This is at least stronger proof against the artist and for the buyer.

As it stands this isn't very valuable yet but in my mind an important milestone.

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